Google Chrome as an Internet Explorer plugin

I just encountered a quite mindboggling piece of news on the Google Wave blog. It seems they have decided not to support Internet Explorer at all. Not IE6, IE7 or IE8. Surprised? I sure was. What’s even better is that to still give these users the opportunity to use Google Wave, they’ve built a plugin for Internet Explorer, that loads the Chrome browser with Google Wave inside it.

What? Load a browser as a plugin inside another one? I guess this is a real war after all? Who will build the first browser to load Firefox into Chrome? Internet Explorer inside Firefox?

Why? Well, now they don’t have to care about Internet Explorer support at all. Felt that heavy weight lift from your shoulders? Suddenly large parts of HTML5, CSS3, and modern javascript, is available to them, with no backporting and performance tuning needed. Must be fabulous.

The big challenge still remains of course; to make users of IE install the plugin. I suppose using services like Wave to actively force them to do it is one way, but I wonder what they plan to do about all the corporate users who don’t have admin access to their workstations.

I’m sorry if you have taken this the wrong way, but I never meant to support old software. IE is still a popular internet browser. I was just surprised that they weren’t going to support any version of it.